Resourcing Births And Deaths Registry Can End Conduct Of Population Census

Samuel Adom Botchway, the Acting Registrar of the Births and Deaths Registry, has urged the Government to support the operations of the institution to deliver on its mandate, including collecting data on the population for national development.

He said, as an institution tasked with the responsibility of registering all births and deaths in the country, the Registry had the potential to collect and provide up-to-date data on the population required by Government for planning and development purposes, if adequately resourced.

This, he said, could also save the country the limited resources it allocated for the conduct of population and housing censuses every decade.

The Acting Registrar made the appeal when Madam Lydia Lamisi Akanvariba, the Minister of State in charge of Public Sector Reforms, paid a working visit to the Registry, in Accra.

The visit was to enable the Minister to obtain a first-hand information on ongoing public sector reform initiatives implemented by the institution under the Public Sector Reform for Results Project (PSRRP) and to identify opportunities for collaboration between the two entities.

The PSRRP is a project funded by the World Bank and implemented by the Government of Ghana to improve efficiency and accountability in the delivery of public services.

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Specifically, it aims to support Ghana’s National Public Sector Reform Strategy (NPSRS) by focusing on improving service delivery within selected public sector institutions.

Mr. Botchway lauded the implementation of the project, indicating that it had had a significant impact on the operations of the institution by increasing its registration coverage.

For instance, by the end of the project in 2023, the institution recorded 731,706 births registration coverage, 231,706 more than the 500,000 target sets by the project.

Mr Botchway, however, called for more assistance, including amending its current Act (Act 1027) of 2020, to boost its deaths registration.

Out of the 240,000 deaths registration target set by the project, the Registry registered only 91,000 deaths at the end of 2023.

Mr. Botchway said amending the current Act to include the confirmation by a death within a community by a community leader would significantly improve the deaths registration.

“We are working with an Act, but you see, my position is that to register a dead person you need to go through a process, and the process is that you either have a medical report or coroner’s report. Here is a case, when you go to our far places, I mean, when you go to our villages, somebody died at home, how can the person provide a medical report or coroner’s report? So this is where the challenge is,” he said.

“…we are trying to see where we can add something to it, which will enhance the registration. At least, if there is a portion that a community leader must attest to it. For example, if Alhaji Ibrahim, a 95-year-old man, and everybody knows in the community that he has been bedridden for some time, when such a person dies, I mean, we don’t need to go through that process to register the person.

“If we are able to add something to this, to enhance the registration, our death registration will go up,” he added.

Mr. Emmanuel Nortey Botchway, Head of Projects, also stressed the need for increased capacity building of staff, particularly those in the hinterlands, to enable them to effectively deliver on their mandates.

Madam Lamisi Akanvariba, Minister, lauded the progress made by the Registry and assured them of the necessary support to improve their services.

She also expressed her readiness to assist the institution to amend its Act to boost its registration process, particularly deaths registration.

“We need to understand that as much as it is important to register somebody that has been born into the world, it’s equally important to register those who are going away. If we are able to work with these two figures effectively, we don’t need to do population census all the time because it’s just a matter of adding some figures and taking some figures out.

“So, we need to provide them with the necessary resources to give us and improve services,” she emphasised.

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